A pilgrimage to the place of origin . . .
“I’ll be going anyway,” he added. “You may as well take advantage of me. My expertise, I mean.”
Okay, so I wasn’t completely forthright with Professor Ho, my parents, or even myself. Sure, I’m totally into the project I got Professor Ho to advise me on. I’ve also got the Tufts project on my laptop, and I’ve looked at plenty of tea samples for Dr. Barry in the lab, which will help create a baseline for my research. When I’m in China, I’ll meet farmers and collect my own tea samples. I’m going to win that Stanford award! But there was—is—something about Sean, besides having an on-the-ground guide who speaks the language, that made me say yes to his offer.
I went back to Stanford, and we communicated by e-mail. We met at his house once when I was home for winter break to go over plans for the trip. I’d figured he was rich, so I wasn’t surprised by the address in Pasadena practically around the corner from Hummingbird Lane. It turned out to be a little more than a “house,” however. It was a grand old mansion built back in the day by some mucky-muck. I figured it must have cost $15 million, give or take, which means that Sean isn’t just rich, he’s superrich. The grounds and the house looked beautiful and well maintained from the outside; inside, it had been gutted down to the studs. We wended our way through the construction to the old housekeeping quarters. The rooms were cozy and warm. One thing could have led to another, but he was all business, and so was I. And we need to keep it that way. We have separate rooms booked for every stop. I have the e-mails to prove it. Besides, nothing can happen if he isn’t on this plane . . .
As soon as the seat belt sign is turned off, I walk toward the front of the plane. When I reach the curtain that divides coach from business, I pass through, trying to look like I belong. Most of the people are Chinese. About half of them are drinking champagne. A flight attendant asks, “Is this your cabin?” Busted.
Back at my seat, I pull out my laptop and try to work. I’ve gathered a lot of material about where I’m going and want to see if there are differences in how the various hill tribes use tea in rituals and folk medicines, as well as how they process it for drinking. Down the rabbit hole . . .
About an hour later, a man’s voice says, “You should have told me you’re interested in Yunnan’s ethnic minorities.”
It’s Sean. He perches an elbow on the seat in front of me, with his hand languidly hanging just inches from my face. He looks unbelievably elegant, which is not a word I’ve ever used about a guy.
“I thought you might have missed the flight.” I try to keep my voice even, but I’m not sure it works because I’m so relieved he’s on the plane I can barely think.
His mouth comes up at the corners. Not a smile. Not a smirk. I have no idea what’s in his mind.
“I know some Dai, Bulang, and Akha farmers,” he says. “Everyone writes about the Dai, because there are so many of them and they have their own written language.” The hand that droops off the seat in front of me shoos away the idea as unworthy. He seems to run through the list in his mind, checking off each tribe one by one. Then, “You might be interested in the Akha, because their culture is very similar to that of the Cree. The culture is animistic. Every living thing has a spirit.”
“I’ve read about them and the whole Cree thing. Downside: the Akha get to have a bad rep similar to that of Native Americans. They don’t save their money, they drink, they take drugs—”
His eyes flash. “It’s easy to fall for stereotypes.” (Ouch. I wasn’t saying I believed those things.) “In the West, you think the individual is supreme, but the Akha see themselves as one link in the long chain of life, adjacent to all the other links of people and cultures, all carrying a collective wave toward the beach to throw a newborn up to safety.”
I feel myself bridling. “Interesting that you’d bring up newborns. If everything has a soul, then what’s up with that stuff about twins?”
“That ended a while ago,” he says, looking a little annoyed now. “They had a cultural belief for, to them, commonsense reasons, which they followed for millennia. Who are you to condemn their culture?”
Before I have a chance to clarify or defend myself, he taps the seat a couple of times—done here—and glides back down the aisle, disappearing behind the curtain that divides the plane.
“Well, that sucked,” the girl next to me comments.
He’s waiting for me when I get off the plane in Guangzhou. I’ve had plenty of hours to formulate a proper answer to his question: just because a group has a cultural belief, whether it’s foot binding in China or female genital cutting in Africa, doesn’t mean that we, as human beings, should sanction the practice. But he seems to have forgotten our misunderstanding or whatever that was. We go through the border formalities, pick up our bags, pass back through security for domestic flights, and board the plane for Kunming. Again we aren’t seated together, nor are we together on the last flight, to Jinghong.
After three back-to-back flights over many hours and time changes, I’m so punchy with exhaustion that I notice little about the airport other than it’s small, drab, and dimly lit. Outside, a driver meets us to take us to Yiwu, the ancient collection center for the Six Great Tea Mountains, starting point of the Tea Horse Road, home of the queen of Pu’er, and our base for the next four nights. It’s about a six-hour drive, I’ve read, with bumpy hairpin turns. This, after all the flights and layovers. I take a Dramamine, roll my hoodie into a pillow, and rest my head. On his side of the backseat, Sean immediately nods off, but as tired as I am I can’t fall asleep. China! And I’m heading to “the middle of nowhere.”
* * *
This is a far different trip than the one I took with my parents. I quickly need to become accustomed to squat toilets, using toilet paper for napkins, and seeing people spit their chicken and fish bones right on the floor. For breakfast—and jet-lagged as hell—we go to an outdoor stand and order chili-flavored soup noodles being cooked over a brazier. We sit on plastic kiddie chairs around a low kiddie-size table—which is plain weird—that looks like it’s never once been wiped down. A dog chews on a bone at my feet. I don’t see a single white face, but there are others who are clearly marked as foreign to Yiwu: Chinese men dressed in spiffy trousers, starched shirts, and polished loafers.